In Tribute: The Complete, Untold Story of US Soccer Star Tessa Hartman

Part 1 of 1

my first post on wattpad, so if there's any grammar errors, or just plain mistakes that I haven't seen before, apologies in advance.

this is something i put together a few months back, but have changed and added a whole lot of stuff to it overtime, also i'd split this into chapters but i've written this like a big article and i couldn't be bothered spliting this into chapters, sorry :)

UPDATE 22/11/2022: Big thanks for all the views, I thought no one would read this tbh.

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When news broke in the early evening of July 24th, 2022, that the Olympic gold medallist, 2x WWC Champion, 2x NWSL Champion and longtime Washington Spirit forward Tessa Hartman had succumbed to liver failure at age 34, a shockwave of atomic force had rippled its way through the entire sports community that left everyone stunned.

As Twitter, Facebook and Instagram became overrun with postings of shock, grief and recollections of fans that had spent the better part of their lives following women's soccer like Rottweiler puppies, you could feel it, this one was different. This one hurt.

"By all accounts, she was the heart of the team." Says current Washington Spirit Assistant Coach and former Portland Thorns player, Angela Salem.

She didn't say much, but she didn't have to. Tessa played a vital part along with the likes of Megan Rapinoe, Alex Morgan, Christen Press and Tobin Heath, who led the national women's team to victory at the 2015 & 2019 Women's World Cup, and helped behind the scenes with the USWNT equal pay settlement. Tessa Hartman was a fixture of that field.

"I'm happy to see how many lives she's touched," Fellow WNT teammate and longtime close friend, Alex Morgan says, "They hardly knew her, but she affected a lot of people. And she didn't even realize it."

But for all the love the sport's community had for her, there was a dark side to the soccer star that confused many of those who came into contact with her. Unlike, say, Ashlyn Harris, Tessa wasn't anyone's "bro."

Like anyone in the public eye, Tessa Hartman was what the media said she was. If you believed the American tabloids, she was a Nazi-memorabilia-collecting, danger to today's youth. If you were a NWSL fan, and a sports magazine reader, you'd know that she was one of the finest minds in women's soccer, a blonde whirlwind who played like a demon.

But if you were lucky enough to spend time with her, you'd know that neither persona summed Tessa Hartman up completely.

The truth is that she was a relatively quiet, introverted person with a dry-as-dust sense of humour, who never bothered to seek the limelight because it simply didn't interest her. That's pretty rare in sports, as it is anywhere else.

Hartman was funny in an endearingly quiet way, painfully honest about her career, and inexperienced when it came to cynical journalists. If she didn't know the answer to a question, she would admit it, but not in a defiant or cocky way: if anything, she sounded a bit unnerved.

And she drank. A lot.

"If she didn't like you, she wouldn't hang with you," says Morgan, from her home in San Diego. "Sometimes she could pick at you but if you tolerated it and stuck it out and showed you could deal with it, then that's how you became friends with her."

Tessa Hartman was born on March 19th, 1988, in Oakland, California. Her German-American family was filled with uncles who served in Vietnam and her German grandfather who'd fought on the Allied side during World War II.

Tessa's love for soccer dates back to the mid to late 90's in the Huntington Park area of Los Angeles. She had watched the likes of Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy and Christie Rampone, and was hooked in an instant while considering them as her idols.